a. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a warning system for an aircraft; and, in particular, to a warning system capable of operating during air-to-air combat maneuvers so that operational limitations of the aircraft will not be exceeded unintentionally due to the pilot's attention being directed outside the cockpit to a threat target or for terrain avoidance and navigation.
b. Description of the Prior Art
Typically, pilots were required to look at the air speed indicator, G-meter, and the engine gauges and mentally compare the readings to operational limitations memorized from technical manuals in order to maintain the aircraft within operational limits. The problems associated with these display instruments include: (1) The gauges were among numerous other instruments in the overall cockpit display. Typically, during air-to-air combat maneuvering, a pilot could not devote the attention required to get the necessary readings from these instruments. (2) The pilot had to assimilate information from several gauges in order to determine if any one specific operational limit had been exceeded, and the pilot generally had to make this assimilation in a very small amount of time. (3) Many of the gauges were imprecise or hard to read. (4) The pilot had to memorize numerous operation limitations.
To simplify the pilot's assimilation of operational conditions for a vehicle, warning systems have been developed which compare numerous monitored operational conditions to operational limits of the vehicle. Based on the comparison, a visual alarm, or an audible alarm, or both are given. However, the visual alarm of these warning systems consists of a flashing light. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,027,838, 4,763,285, 4,870,412, and 4,980,684 are representative of these conventional warning systems. These conventional warning systems fail to indicate simultaneously to the pilot in a simple and easily assimilated manner whether multiple operational conditions are approaching the operational limits. Furthermore, these conventional warning systems do not indicate the degree, in a dynamic sense, to which operational conditions are within or exceed operational limits.